Scripting News for 5/31/2006

Tonight: Henry’s Hunan, 110 Natoma St, 6:30PM. 

I admit I’m corny but I can’t get this song out of my head. 

Fran: “I talked to over one hundred occupational therapists, and only 3 had ever heard of podcasting.” 

Jaron Lanier: “The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.” 

Martin Schwimmer: “If you coin and promulgate a term, you can sell it as a buzzword or you can sell it as a brand, but under trademark law, it’s virtually impossible to do both.” 

Lots of interesting comments following Tim O’Reilly’s post.  

Just a demo 

Imagine™ what™ the™ world™ would™ be™ like™ if™ everyone™ trademarked™ every™ word™ that™ was™ ever™ added™ to™ the™ language.™ It™ would™ get™ pretty™ tiresome™ really™ fast.™

Scripting News for 5/30/2006

Don’t forget, dinner tomorrow night, Henry’s Hunan, SF. 

PR Week on Share Your OPML. 

I had my pre-BloggerCon talk this morning with John Palfrey, who will lead the pivotal How To Make Money session. I learned my lesson, last time we tried to steer the conversation in a direction away from where the room wanted to go. This time I will put duct tape over my mouth and let JP follow the room. My talk with Elisa Camahort changed my thinking about this session. Let’s see where the room wants to go. Previous DLs on this topic were Doc Searls and Jeff Jarvis.  

Also spoke with Lance Knobel who is leading the discussion on Blogging and the 2008 Election. This is another of our perma-threads, the political discussion has been part of BC since the first one in October 2003 in Cambridge. Back then the idea of blogging in politics was in its infancy, today, in 2006 its commonplace; and who knows where it will be in 2008. That’s what we’ll cover in late June in SF. 

Here’s what’s great about Berkeley in the summer. The weather is perfect, and there’s no one here. The streets are empty because all the kids have gone home, yet the weather is the best in the entire United States. While its hot and steamy back east, the high today in Berkeley will be 71 with a very nice breeze coming in from the Bay. The main question is do I want to take my walk in the morning when I have to wear a jacket (temp in the mid-upper 50s) or in a t-shirt, in the afternoon when it’s in the high 60s. Meanwhile in Florida it’s 82 degrees, climbing to a high near 90. Thunderstorms in the afternoon. Air conditioning weather. Yuck! 

I had my pre-BloggerCon talk yesterday with Chris Pirillo. He’s going to lead a discussion about the power of users. 

Sam Ruby spotted a problem with SYO, which we fixed. He also suggests that we disclose, again, that Mike Arrington has, in the past, represented me as an attorney, which is true. I also appreciate the support received from Dare Obasanjo and Gabe Rivera in the thread on Ruby’s site.  

O’Reilly and “Web 2.0″ trademark issues 

I’ve not commented on the Web 2.0 trademark issues because I didn’t want to be part of the flood of discourse. I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of “feedback” and it’s not very productive or pleasant, and runs a predictable course, and I’d like to see us be a little less predictable, and a little wiser, here in the blogosphere. So I waited, and now that things have settled down, I would like to weigh in.

1. The blogs seem to have a knee-jerk opinion that everything involving lawyers is wrong. I don’t agree. There are times when people can’t settle their differences without legal representation. There are also times when all discussion must be handled by lawyers. Just because we have an Internet and blogs doesn’t change this simple fact. We have lawyers because we exist in the context of a legal system. It’s got flaws, but in my limited experience, it usually seems to come to the right conclusion. Lawyers provide important services, which we need to keep our economy and society working.

2. Everything O’Reilly, CMP and Battelle said about protecting trademarks is true. If you want to keep your trademark, the law requires that you challenge all infringing uses of it.

3. However, if they wanted to protect the trademark, it seems to me that they should have been sending demand letters from the beginning. It appears they started when it became clear that the USPTO was going to grant their application to register the mark. That said, I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know whether the lack of consistency weakens their ownership of the trademark.

4. Key point: O’Reilly is a business and it behaves like a business. It is not a political cause. Its purpose is to achieve ROI for its shareholders, and it does this very well. They’ve made millions of dollars commercializing ideas that others gave away for free, while the blogosphere, naively, has bought into the idea that O’Reilly is something other than a business. This is illustrated perfectly by Cory Doctorow’s defense. They created the Web 2.0 name, perhaps (some dispute this), but that’s all. The ideas behind Web 2.0 are other people’s work, and those people, for the most part, haven’t made any money from it. If O’Reilly were to lose control of the trademark they still would be way, way ahead. There’s no reason for their arguments to gain sympathy at an emotional level, even if they gain sympathy at a business level. There’s an important distinction here.

5. The shock came from naivete being awoken by the reality. I don’t think the O’Reilly people fully understand how much the blogosphere has bought into the idea that O’Reilly is sort of a non-profit for great ideas. To see them act so boldly in a commercial fashion is something they needed to be prepared for, and there was no preparation.

Postscript: Jason Calacanis also waited to comment, and came to similar conclusions.

Tim O’Reilly responds.

Free idea of the day 

Everyone loves TinyUrl. It really works, it’s almost like magic, but it’s often a bit too much work. Even so, sometimes you have to use it, for example, when sending a link to a Google Map page in an email message. You never know how the various email handlers are going to deal with the long URL when transferring it.

But what if, when you click on Link To This Page in Google Maps, it generated a short URL as a proxy for the long URL it would normally generate? That is, what if they baked in the TinyUrl functionality? Wouldn’t that be great?

And for extra credit, offer to license the TinyUrl name for say $2 million, as a gesture of goodwill to all the users who love nice little (tiny!) web services that are useful, but want it all to be even more useful, without feeling the guilt of helping a giant to wipe out a cool little company.

Scripting News for 5/29/2006

Scoble’s mom’s house. Wow! 

Mike Arrington grapples with rumors about integrity. 

Suw Charman wonders how many news staff read their own RSS feeds. 

Dan Fost reports on WineCamp.  

Paolo wishes it were easier to share.  

Security will be extra tight at FU-Camp 2006. :-) 

Scripting News for 5/28/2006

Barry Bonds hits #715 to pass Babe Ruth. 

8/28/96: “I wonder if the bees are philosophical about their condition in the last minutes of life.” 

SYO: The chicken, egg & frying pan 

TechCrunch: “Share Your OPML is already a good blog ranking system, and over time it has the chance to become the definitive ranking and recommendation system for blogs. And when I saw that, I’m thinking the very long tail of blogs, not just the top 100 or even 1,000.”

I really appreciate that Mike Arrington is taking another look at SYO.

For people who are new to the process of innovation in RSS, it’s a bootstrap, it’s how RSS got started in the first place.

There was no chicken and egg at first, we needed both a chicken and an egg (and a frying pan too).

The three parts were:

1. A tool that could generate RSS (that was Manila, and then Radio);

2. An aggregator that could do interesting things with the RSS (Radio) and

3. Content (first Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool, Scripting News, a handful of blogs, then a torrent, followed by the BBC and the NY Times and then a flood of BigPubs).

SYO is not a new idea, it’s actually the third implementation of an idea that started with the Radio Community Server, circa 2002. We tracked the subscriptions of all Radio users, and published the results. In 2004 came the first SYO site, the first to introduce rudimentary collaborative filtering. It hit a scaling wall and had to come down, until we could get up a LAMP implementation, earlier this month. We’ve basically matched the functionality of the 2004 edition and are ready to grow.

Now, at this point, I’m looking for co-investors and a handful of developers to work on the software. If you find the prospects intriguing and have resources to contribute, think about it, and let me know. I’m interested in working with people with deep experience in collaborative filtering, to balance my understanding of RSS, OPML and the various communities involved.

We’re going to build all three legs, again, and when it’s done, there will be a new layer on the RSS activity, and it’ll be interesting and fun. I know this because it is already interesting an fun. Now we need to make it easier, and more automatic.

An upgrade to the XML-RPC server in Frontier 

The Frontier web programming environment moved fast in the late 90s, but maybe a bit too fast, and some ideas that came later didn’t get pushed back into the earlier stuff.

An example is the very neat way mainResponder mapped domains to content. This is something we never did with XML-RPC, yet it’s very easy to do.

A few weeks ago, I needed it, when implementing the ping handler for SYO. After doing it in a one-off fashion, I then did it in a general way, and released it for the OPML Editor.

5/24/06: A simple enhancement to the XML-RPC server.

I’d like to see it make its way into other distributions of the Frontier kernel.

Tom Morris asks… 

Tom Morris: “If you know how to automate tool updates (like Dave does with NewsRiver etc.), I’d love to talk to you.”

Wellll, if you haven’t heard from anyone Tom, I’d be happy to show you how to do it.

The first requirement is that you have a server online 24-by-7, running the OPML Editor, so it can be the subscription server. That may not be possible. But if you can, I’ll outline the steps for you, maybe even write a script that automates the process.

You also have to learn how to use WebEdit to check in new parts that will be received by your users when they update. It’s not hard to learn how to do this. I can show you how.

The only thing I ask in return is that when the next person comes along wanting to do this you will help them.

Tom Morris responds. Okay, I’ll start assembling some docs, in a little bit.

Scripting News for 5/27/2006

Steve Gillmor has the summertime blues.  

Cooool, a new Douglas Coupland book to kvell over.  

Ryanne Hodson did a video explaining the Videoblogging session at BloggerCon IV. 

Cory Doctorow: “If you’re going to name the next direction the world will take, you have to be prepared for the world to take that direction. Industry shifts become public property — or rather, things that are privately controlled can’t shift a diverse industry.” 

If you live in the East Bay, as I do, you’ll likely want to know that the Bay Bridge will be closed a few times in June so they can re-route traffic on the upper level. 

On the Apple decision 

A very simple editorial on yesterday’s decision by the Sixth District Court of Appeals that bloggers are entitled to the same protection as print journalists; that a rich corporation can’t control the bloggers that cover it.

1. The day a U.S. court comes to a different conclusion will be the day the First Amendment dies. As long as the courts continue to uphold the principle that the First Amendment applies equally to online media, we’re reasonably safe. And by “we” I don’t mean the practitioners, I mean the whole society.

2. It’s unwise and hypocritical of Apple Computer, to profit from the expansion of the online community — the latest Mac comes with promotional material touting its ability to write blogs and create podcasts — and at the same time trying to control it to suit its corporate purposes. Someday there will be a company that not only has inspiring advertisments and products, but will actually have a philosophy that is consistent, that returns the generosity it received by feeding and nurturing the environment in which it exists. A consistent Apple, with integrity, would stand up for free speech on the Internet, not try to destroy it. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.

3. Blogging won, again. Someday we will form our own computer company, from this environment, one which we own and fully control. Apple thought we exist in its environment and that the courts would back it up, and in doing so proved that their hearts are cold as cash, and their love of their users is a marketing strategy. Eventually we will replace Apple with a company more compatible with our values.

Again, thanks to the courts. We certainly can’t depend on the executive and legislative branches of government, or the companies that profit from the Internet. The courts, and a free press are our last bastions of hope, such as they exist.

Scripting News for 5/26/2006

Steve Jobs: “If you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.” 

I had lunch today in Berkeley with George Coates, the creative mind behind Better Bad News. I’ll have lots more to say about this, for sure. Possibly some theater for BloggerCon IV. I wasn’t sure which of the guys on Better Bad News he is, turns out he’s none of them. I asked why his picture isn’t on the web somewhere, he said it is, but it’s on page 4 of a Google image search. Well, there are only 3 pages. Heh. There is a picture of him in this interview, but it’s a very old pic, he doesn’t really look like that today. We talked about 9-11 and what blogging would be like after civilian government is suspended in the US. He told me to read this book by David Ray Griffin.  

Wired: Apple Loses Bid to Unmask Bloggers’ Sources. 

One of my Sims 2 characters all of a sudden has a cloud of bubbles around her head, all the time, everywhere she goes. I can’t figure out what this means! What does it mean?  

Julian Bond asks, humorously, if we can’t call it Web 2.0, how about Web 0.92. Hey how about that, it’s an RSS joke. :-) 

O’Reilly corporate response to the “Web 2.0″ controversy. 

John Battelle: “This is not some evil plot to ‘own’ Web 2.0.” 

Apparently CMP filed for the trademark on 11/26/03.  

Marc Canter wants to know what Cory Doctorow thinks. 

PC World’s 25 worst tech products of all time. 

3 years ago today I asked who would pay for software. 

OPML Support is an “extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser that adds OPML import/export functionality to the Firefox Bookmarks manager.” 

Scoble’s mom 

I called him up last night after I read on his blog that his mom had died. It wasn’t unexpected, she had a stroke a couple of weeks ago, a bad one, and that didn’t leave much of Mrs Scoble alive. Not enough to make it. So he’s had a bit of time to catch up, but then I guess you never get a chance to really prepare for something like this. When it happens, it hits you like a ton of bricks, changes everything, forever.

We chatted about stuff, this and that, I mentioned that I was shopping for houses in Berkeley, and he asked if this was a good time for that, and I said, at 51, you stop worrying about things like that so much. By the time it’s a good time to buy a house again maybe I’ll be dead, or sick, or whatever. Now is the time to shop for a house. Is it time to buy? We’ll find out.

He decided to buy his wife a new car, not a cheap one either. The one she wanted. Good move. Now she’ll have to deal with a new reality, a husband who gives her what she wants. Everyone gets to give up all the old struggles. Will they find new ones? Not this week, probably not next week either. But now it’s time for change, a big tree falls, old struggles are over, forever, it’s time for dreams to take hold, new ones, creativity, maybe some happiness.

Mothers and fathers are our teachers, a few years ago when it looked like my dad was going to die, I was still learning from him, and he survived, to be an inspiration, again and again. You never know what’s coming next in life, that’s the great thing about it. Scoble’s mom, even after her life is over, continues to teach. Not just Scoble, not just Maryam, but me, and if you’re reading this, you.

Namaste Mrs Scoble and her family, and thank you.

I still say no to web two oh

I had a post on Scripting News for most of the day yesterday that, after the crazy “Web 2.0″ news of today, must seem prescient. I decided, coming back from the baseball game that it wasn’t worth the grief it would likely cause, so I took it down.

Richard MacManus relents, and decides that Web 2.0 is here to stay, and Mike Arrington sighs in relief and explains why he remains loyal to the concept.

Me, well, I’ve always believed in the Two-way Web, back before it was hip. I even coined the term Internet 3.0, to describe the P2P level that came after RSS and XML-RPC and SOAP. Some part of me is sure that this was the inspiration for the creation of the new moniker.

What I object to about “Web 2.0″ is that it was created to exclude people from the conversation, and by the way, I’m one of those people. They’re planning the third Web 2.0 conference, and I haven’t gotten an invite to present, and I’m not holding my breath.

The Microsoft Mix 06 conference was an obvious attempt to hop on the same bandwagon, again, no invite to speak (they wanted me in the audience, but I don’t believe in audiences anymore, so thanks but no thanks).

Tim Berners-Lee warns of a dark net, but we don’t need to wait for that, it’s already here, in Silicon Valley and South of Market. It’s the web of them, not us, and you need not apply, because it’s going to stay that way.

I love and admire Mike and Richard, and I’m glad they’re welcomed by the owners of Web 2.0, but until they put out a welcome mat for everyone else, I’m going to keep looking to the future, because I think that kind of exclusivity belongs in the past.

And Mike, if you wanted to get rid of the problem, one call to O’Reilly or Battelle right now would probably take care of it. And mention it to Kevin Werbach as well. That you and so many others quietly acquiesce allows the exclusivity to continue. Until then, I’m going to keep looking for a route-around, and some day, hopefully soon, we’ll find it.

What prompted this piece

I read The Accordion Guy’s piece explaining how Toronto could become Silicon Valley. I groaned out loud. Please, let’s figure out how Silicon Valley could be more like Toronto. SV is a boring place with a totally shitty attitude, it’s trouble with a capital T. This boom-bust cycle isn’t something I’d wish on a city I hate, and Toronto is such a nice place.

Sure, you want to be rich, but there’s a nice way to be successful and an ugly way. Silicon Valley isn’t nice. But the sentiment is real. Lots of people have envious feelings when they look at this place. And that’s by design. Keep doing what you’re doing, create inclusivity, welcome all comers, and you’ll be where Silicon Valley was in the middle of the last century. Where it is now is not good.

Scripting News for 5/25/2006

Top Podcasts is a new readout of the most-subscribed-to podcasts among Share Your OPML users. Obviously just getting started, with only 117 subscribers for the top-rated podcast, but numbers are interesting, imho.  

Randy Morin: “The coolest new happening in Web 2.0-land in that last month is Share Your OPML.” 

Apparently, Web 2.0 is a trademark. CMP sent a letter to an Irish conference on June 8 using the term in its name, demanding that they cease and desist. 

According to Google, the term “Web 2.0″ appears 79,400,000 times on the web. 

NY Times: “Viacom now has an explicit policy. In a section on confidentiality, it states that the employee is ‘discouraged from publicly discussing work-related matters, whether constituting confidential information or not, outside of appropriate work channels, including online in chat rooms or blogs.’” 

4/26/06: “Of course what I wanted to talk about is Rather becoming a blogger. He said that [Viacom] discourages it.” 

Nick Bradbury: Pick a Format (Any Format). Agree. 

Instructables is a “community for showing what you make and how others can make it.” 

Ross Mayfield says that Nick Carr is the new Dave Winer. I imagine he intended this as an insult, but I’m happy to be compared with Carr, if he’s going to keep challenging the sloppy thinking so typical of technology hucksters. 

XML-RPC is getting new respect from Microsoft and Linden Labs. It’s always been a popular site, lots of implementations, it’s rational, easy to use technology that works well. 

Realistic expectations for Wikipedia 

The comment thread that followed Nick Carr’s piece about Wikipedia illustrates the mistake of the most zealous Wikipedia advocates, they fail to set expectations accurately, and then, when someone like Carr takes their hype at face value, they attack him for not knowing how Wikipedia really works. It’s a Catch-22, they attack because he believed them. Sort of makes people reluctant to discuss Wikipedia.

In this case, Carr said that anyone could edit any piece at any time. That’s certainly the core element of the hype around Wikipedia. Now we find out that there are limits. The advocates say this was always true. Carr thought it was a change, and he can be forgiven for that, because the very same zealots told us it was so.

This is the dangerous anti-intellectual side of Wikipedia.

It’s valuable, it really is, I point to Wikipedia articles regularly, but always with an implicit caveat. I can’t be sure that the article I point to today, that I believe is accurate today, will be accurate tomorrow.

Now if the strongest advocates of Wikipedia would start talking realistically about the weaknesses of the approach in addition to the strengths, the utopian stuff, we might be able to work together to improve it. But there’s no evidence of that in the latest round.

Postscript: Carr says it’s time to bury the mythology surrounding Wikipedia, and I couldn’t agree more strongly.

Sitting by the river 

The Chinese have a saying that if you sit by the river long enough, the dead body of your enemy will come floating by.

Scripting News for 5/24/2006

New Flickr set: Giants vs Cardinals. Live. 

Final score: St Louis 10, San Francisco 4. The wifi at the park was awesome.  

The moving picture view from AT&T Park. 

Steve Gillmor: “I’m having the time of my life.” 

I didn’t know that there was an official Lost podcast. 

Nick Carr says Wikipedia is over. “The end came last Friday. That’s when Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, proposed ‘that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public.’” 

Lee Gomes: “What Apple has, and what Wintel badly needs, is a design tyrant like Steve Jobs.” 

Ross Rader expands on this point.  

This morning I had my pre-conference talk with Ryanne Hodson, who will lead the discussion about video blogging. Tomorrow I’m talking with Phillip Torrone. 

A utility script that runs in the OPML Editor (or Frontier or Radio) that lists the enabled threads and everyMinute scripts that might be slowing your system down. It found a few problems on my system.  

Scripting News for 5/23/2006

New Flickr set: After a long rainy spell, the sun came out, and so did the flowers, and walkers. (Flowrs, walkrs?) 

The Mac equivalent of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  

Movie version of the Mac equiv of the BSOD. 

Another good Top Ten Lies Of list would be the Top Ten Lies of Apple Computer. They say in their TV ads that Macs work better with Japanese cameras. This is not true. Windows XP understands them every bit as well as Macs do. I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t respond to Apple’s ads. Apple is just regurgitating the (mistaken) conventional wisdom. They’re kind of doing Microsoft a favor, because they’re marketing against where Windows was ten years ago. (And actually Windows NT had already solved many of the problems they’re talking about.) A Microsoft ad with a spinning color cursor would be pretty interesting. Love that user-friendly Mac. Sitting there waiting. And waiting. Hello Mac. Fair is fair. If Apple can say Windows is nerdy, MS can say Macs are stoners. :-) 

BTW, they aren’t kidding when they say you shouldn’t use a MacBook on your lap. You could fry an egg on one of those babies. I bet the egg would actually cook. 

Tomorrow I’m going to the Giants day game with Niall Kennedy. Should be pretty cool, we got field level box seats directly behind home plate. Section 115, Row K.  

Niall and I are also co-hosting a pre-BloggerCon dinner in San Francisco next Wednesday, May 31.  

Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Guy Kawasaki. 

Thanks to Matt Deatherage for the link.  

BTW, when talking with Elisa this morning, I asked her who she thought I should ask to lead the discussion on making money with blogs. She brought up Guy’s name. I said I didn’t think Guy would make a good DL, but I do think he’d be an excellent contributor. I would love to have him at BloggerCon, and I mean it, and I hope he doesn’t think that’s hypocritical (one of the problems with calling unnamed people names on your blog is that everyone tends to think you’re talking about them). And Guy, if I’m an A-lister, what does that make you? Your Technorati rank is much higher than mine. For the record I don’t care what my rank is (or yours), and it’s up to you to figure out if that’s a lie. :-) 

Truth be told, it is a lie. Sort of. :-) 

This morning, I had my pre-conference talk with Elisa Camahort, who will lead a discussion at BloggerCon IV. Over the next few weeks I’ll talk with each of the discussion leaders at least once. 

I’m going to a friend’s birthday party on Saturday in SF, but if I weren’t I’d certainly be at WineCamp, in Calaveras County. What a great idea. Get away from the city, the traffic, and hang out with some smart people and drink wine and camp out under the stars. Excellent! 

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes that even if Feedburner dies, we’ll live. Okay, I didn’t say otherwise and it’s hard to argue we’d all die if they did, so I won’t (but sometimes people’s lives do depend on technology working, more often than perhaps we’d like to admit). On the other hand, why should we give up anything for the convenience of some more statistics? Why can’t we have it all? And if we’re giving something up (of course we are, they aren’t a charity) shouldn’t we know what we’re giving up?  

My mother has a letter in today’s NY Times. 

They need a new fact checker? 

Business 2.0: “In an ideal digital world, we’d be able to buy copyrighted music and videos wherever we wanted, not just on a designated store. But that’s been the fate of iPod users, who can only buy content off of Apple’s iTunes Music Store.”

Not true. I’ve been using an iPod since they came out and I’ve never bought a song from their music store. Further, we would never have been able to develop podcasting if this were true.

Perhaps the mistake is in the use of the word “copyrighted,” which is not the same thing as copy protected.

Either way, they need someone with a decent education to review their articles before they publish them.

I suppose it’s possible that they’re deliberately trying to conflate the two terms? If so, that’s kind of corrupt.